I think "runway" (i.e. your personal savings) is a terrible idea that should be debunked and dropped by the entrepreneurial community.
You don't have runway - you have the savings to buy a house, or form the foundation for the next stage of your life.
If you build your business whilst you have a source of income then you have infinite runway - you can keep trying until your dying day or you give up.
It's only after you've tried to build your social network for dogs and failed that you look back and say "wow, that $120,000 was actually ALOT of money - it's going to take me years to make that again". AND now you don't have money to build your next great idea - Uber for petwalking.
Using your savings as "runway" is just gambling with unlikely odds.
Any "runway" that can keep you going for a year in a modern western city is ALOT of money - you're really undervaluing that money if you use it just to live whilst creating a business. And you're also assuming that you're going to be able to make that same amount of money just as easily another time - that may or may not be true at all.
I’m working and doing a side project and there are some more advantages:
I work as a web dev. I can legitimately learn on the job. That learning then benefits the side project. Example: typescript, shell, k8s, css etc.
I have less time on the side project so there is less fluffing. No docs, no unit tests, no Haskell, just getting it done with what I am proficient at. This might ironically mean I get more done than if I was full time as I’d be tempted to gold plate.
I’m exhausted when I get home and the code I write then just (about) gets the job done. It’d fail interviews big time though.
You don't have runway - you have the savings to buy a house, or form the foundation for the next stage of your life.
If you build your business whilst you have a source of income then you have infinite runway - you can keep trying until your dying day or you give up.
It's only after you've tried to build your social network for dogs and failed that you look back and say "wow, that $120,000 was actually ALOT of money - it's going to take me years to make that again". AND now you don't have money to build your next great idea - Uber for petwalking.
Using your savings as "runway" is just gambling with unlikely odds.
Any "runway" that can keep you going for a year in a modern western city is ALOT of money - you're really undervaluing that money if you use it just to live whilst creating a business. And you're also assuming that you're going to be able to make that same amount of money just as easily another time - that may or may not be true at all.